In today's economy, advertising and promotions play a significant role in marketing campaigns. Traditionally, one of the ways to deliver promotional messages has been via use of billboards and posters located in public places. This requires a long and inefficient process, involving graphic designers, printing houses, advertising agencies and billboard owners.
Since the life cycle of many products is quite short, a quick method of delivering advertising material is required. In the past, advertisers spent six or more months for advertising campaigns. Such lead times are becoming less and less feasible. The effectiveness of marketing tools depends heavily on timing, graphical form and attractiveness of the message presented. Consumers now expect dynamic multimedia displays as seen on the Internet and graphic designers want to express themselves in a new ways. In contrast, prior art billboard and poster displays are generally static where one site is occupied by the same material for a long duration of time. Also, the content displayed on the billboards and posters is difficult to change.
Marketing has become a complicated international business process requiring many interactions between many global participants. The logistics of putting new content on or updating the billboards, for example in response to market fluctuations, is complicated and involves several parties, which raises the cost and extends the time from conception to actual display of the poster (i.e. a new printed poster to be installed over the old one). Furthermore, only one advertiser can use each billboard location at any given time. Finally, marketing campaign designers are forced to deal with many billboard operators with different business practices and requirements. This slows down delivery of campaign content and limits the flexibility in delivery method.
In recent years, an unprecedented growth in the economy has been experienced. An undisputed factor in this growth is the role of the Internet which enables business to be performed over the Internet. This includes broadcasting information about available products and services, taking orders for goods and enabling flow of information between business participants.
Advertising has also become prevalent on the Internet as exemplified by U.S. Pat. No. 6,009,409 to Adler et al. and International patent application NO WO97/41546 to Hylin et al. U.S. Pat. No. 6,009,409 is directed at a system for controlling timing and form of advertisements sent to users who are actively browsing the Internet. WO 97/41546 describes a system which focuses on the control of displays over private local area networks with limited telephone access.
In both of these prior art systems, advertising material is shown to the user without the user's consent. The advertiser takes advantage of the fact that a user is browsing a screen and places their advertising in an available space. Also, both systems are susceptible to unauthorized access since the owner of the display has no control over the advertising material.
In order to overcome the limitations of the prior art, there is provided a method and system for scheduling the dynamic display of marketing campaigns via a network.